It is a logical fallacy to claim that tritium levels should be similar to those expected from D-D fusion in order to prove nuclear origin. Because this assumes a priori the type of nuclear process.
I have a pretty long response to this, so I've broken it up into 4 parts in different posts.
4. Tritium?
I don't know if anyone can identify errors or artifacts in Will's measurements from the publication alone. But neither can one rule them out, or for that matter rule out deception or sabotage from the publication alone.
But in the post-APS cold fusion era, for trace levels of tritium to be taken seriously would take some kind of consistent body of results from several different laboratories. The results were already not consistent with the claimed levels of excess power, so they should at least be consistent with other tritium measurements.
However, tritium claims were more closely associated with controversy than consistency. The largest claims came in the period immediately after March 1989, from preliminary experiments. As time past, and the experiments became more careful, the claims became more cautious, and finally negative in some cases, and then tritium experiments all but stopped, without a single interesting question about it answered. In Storms 2010 review, his vague description of what is known 20 years later is almost comical: "It is rarely produced in cold-fusion environments and has no correlation to heat and helium generation. [...] As is the case with all of the cold fusion reactions, this one is also sensitive to conditions on the cathode surface where tritium originates. These rarely formed conditions handicap a study..." He never says what the conditions are.
Claytor pursued tritium at LANL for years, and the last report I've seen is from 1998, where he still claims tritium, but admits that "due to the subtle and weak nature of the signals observed, we have taken many precautions and checks to prevent contamination and to confirm the tritium is not due to an artifact". The appeal of looking for tritium was that it is so scarce in nature that production in cold fusion would be unmistakeable, and yet after 8 years, they were evidently no more definitive than the excess heat measurements.
McKubre also studied tritium for a long time with funding from EPRI, and in his final report in 1998, he says "No tritium generation was observed." and elsewhere: "...we may nevertheless state with some confidence that tritium is not a routinely produced product of the electrochemical loading of deuterium into palladium."
Will, it would seem, abandoned cold fusion even earlier, and from what I could determine, became involved in conventional battery research. That seems an odd career move for someone who has confidence that he has proved LENR. It is odd that Storms does not cite Will's paper in the tritium section of his 2010 review, considering he is pals with Rothwell, and Rothwell often cites Will as irrefutable proof of LENR.
Taken together, the tritium results are anything but definitive, and even the researchers seem to have lost confidence in them.